Page 1 - Introduction

Wastewater Treatment plants (WWTP) are designed to remove pollutants
through physical, chemical and biological processes to mitigate damage
to the surrounding environment. I want to observe the types of factors
influencing treatment procedures and pollutants through these three
questions:
1. How do the wastewater treatment plans differ from WWTPs
near the shoreline and those more inland?
2. Is there a relationship between the amount of river water
discharged from a WWTP, the treatment quality and the amount of
pollutants?
3. Does the river discharge have an influence on the
operational status of a WWTP?
Data Cleaning: Filtering only United States WWTPs into data
visualizations, reordering factor levels of wastewater treatment type,
renaming WWTP coast distances and converting the coast distance data to
long format.
Dataset: HydroWASTE_v10.csv
By: Connor Quiroz, California State University, Monterey Bay
Page 2 - Coastal WWTPs
Column
Primary treatment allows solids to (settle and be removed from
wastewater, secondary treatment uses biological processes to further
purify wastewater and advanced treatment uses new experimental
techniques including filtration, carbon adsorption, distillation and
reverse osmosis (EPA). Using more
treatments removes more water pollutants.
Most WWTPs are further than 50kmthe coast, with <50km being the
nextfrequent, and the least amount of WWTPSwithin 10km of the
beach.
Column
As the design capacity increases for a WWTP increases, the amount of
the population members served also increases.
A higher proportion of WTTPS within 50km of the coast use advanced
treatment procedures than only secondary treatment.
Page 3 Freshwater WWTPs
Dilition Factor is the ratio of concentration in the effluent to
concentration in the receiving water after mixing in the receiving water
(USGS).
Higher dilution factors are related to higher pollution levels in
wastewater.
Column
As the treatment quality increases for each WWTP, the amount of
dilution factors also increases, indicating that advanced levels of
treatment remove more toxins. There are also very few data points for
primary treatment, and this might be because most WWTPS operate using
secondary and advanced levels of treatment and only use primary in
specific circumstances.

Higher discharge rates are more frequent among WWTPs operating under
secondary treatment levels
